What it's like shooting a Kodak Cirkut No. 8 in 2025

My friend and I recently completed a project where we rebuilt and shot a Kodak Cirkut No. 8, a clockwork-driven rotating panoramic camera from the early 1900s. I wanted to share some of what we learned because there's not a ton of practical information out there about actually using one of these things today.

For anyone unfamiliar, the Cirkut line was Kodak's panoramic system designed for wide group shots, cityscapes, and military regiment photos. The No. 8 shoots on 8-inch-wide film and can produce negatives anywhere from a couple feet to several feet long depending on the degree of rotation. The camera physically rotates on a geared tripod head while the film is pulled past a slit at the focal plane. The "shutter speed" is really just how fast the camera spins, with the slit staying open the entire time.

Finding and rebuilding one: There's no such thing as a ready-to-shoot Cirkut at this point. We found a non-functioning one on eBay and had to take the clockwork mechanism apart, clean it, and repair it using pieces from other even more broken ones. The gear system is pretty intricate. The camera uses interchangeable gears to match the rotation speed to the focal length of whatever lens you mount, so the film travels at the right rate relative to the image being projected. Getting all of that synced up correctly took a bit of trial and error, but wasn't too bad.

Film: Kodak stopped making Cirkut film a long time ago. There are a handful of people still hand-rolling 8-inch spools using Agfa Aviphot stock, which works well since its development characteristics are well documented. The spools are basically giant rolls of 220 with paper leaders so you can load in subdued light.

Shooting: Leveling the tripod is critical since the camera rotates on it. If it's not perfectly level, your horizon drifts across the image. Focusing works like a large format view camera, but you have to check focus across the entire arc of rotation since you're covering 180+ degrees. We were shooting at infinity on an 11" doublet lens, so depth of field was forgiving, but alignment still mattered.

Developing: This is where it gets interesting. No standard tank or tray can handle a negative that's three feet long. We built a tube setup based on a method described by Drew Tanner online. The negative gets clamped to a screen to reduce stiction (wet film loves to stick to itself), loaded lengthwise into the tube, and then rolled on casters for 15 minutes of continuous agitation. Stop, fix, wash. About 40 minutes per negative. We did seven.

Scanning: We couldn't handle this at home. We found a lab (Pro-Lab in Clifton, NJ) that was able to scan each negative in sections and return high-res TIFFs, which we then stitched together.

The whole project started because we wanted to recreate a specific 1910 panorama of our town that was shot on this exact type of camera, so we were also trying to match a specific vantage point, time of year, and focal length. The original photo and modern recreation can be seen here, and we were lucky enough to have PetaPixel and 35mmc share some articles about the process, including some behind-the-scenes photos of journey. Happy to go into more detail on any of this if people have questions about Cirkut cameras or large-format panoramic photography in general.